Speed & Other Liberties

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Andrew Sant Speed & Other Liberties
Search for a word or phrase in this book … Biographical note: Andrew Sant was born in London. He migrated with his parents to Melbourne, Australia where he completed his education. He has subsequently lived in London at various times, including much of the present decade. During this time he has been Writing Fellow at the University of Leicester and, currently, at the University of Chichester. In 2001 he was resident in Beijing, China. He jointly founded the literary quarterly, Island, based in Tasmania, where by that time he had moved, and has worked as a teacher, copywriter and editor. Tremors — New & Selected Poems, published in 2004, was his ninth collection. BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844713479 ISBN: 9781844713479 Author: Andrew Sant Title: Speed & Other Liberties Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BB Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 15-Mar-08 Extent: 80pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 5 mm Weight: 120 gms Supplier: Gardners Books Supplier: Ingram Book Group Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: NP Price: GBP 12.99 Price: USD 23.95 Rights: World	See larger image HARDBACK 20% off at the UK Bookstore! ~~£12.99~~ £10.39	Short description/annotation: Space travel likened to a dream, pursued refugees, bikes ‘ridden in a free-form dance with cars’, Olympian exertion, and a crime whose solution involves global flight – these are some of the many forms of motion in Andrew Sant’s tenth collection of poems. Set in Australia, China and Europe, the poems predominantly angle in on aspects of speed, a matter the French historian Marc Bloch considered the one particularly distinctive feature that distinguishes contemporary civilisation from those which preceded it. They include narratives, lyrics, dramatic monologues – diverse points of view with social and political dimensions. Main description: Space travel likened to a dream, pursued refugees, bikes ‘ridden in a free-form dance with cars’, Olympian exertion, and a crime whose solution involves global flight — these are some of the many forms of motion in Andrew Sant’s tenth collection of poems. Set in Australia, China and Europe, the poems predominantly angle in on aspects of speed, a matter the French historian Marc Bloch considered the one particularly distinctive feature that distinguishes contemporary civilisation from those which preceded it. They include narratives, lyrics, dramatic monologues — diverse points of view with social and political dimensions. The other liberties of the title exist – often under pressure but whose boundaries are often broadened by wit – in recognisable rural and urban environments as well as in imagined places, for example in a playfully conceived banana’s republic. Another is an island which has affinities with Robinson Crusoe’s. The book also introduces for the first time Mr Habitat, a brisk character with a strong voice, who is nowhere at home yet in gutsy, colloquial language expresses his views and makes wry observations — often in tight urban situations. It is a collection that’s verbally headlong, edgy and energetic, richly observant and wide-ranging, concluding with the celebratory poem ‘Abundance’, about bird and sea life off the Irish coast, and which suggests there is much to be gained from recognising that certain liberties exist at an irreversible cost. Table of contents: Alpha Stanzas The Sunlight Inland Luxuries on Market Day The Morning of the Funeral Poem for the Refugees Nike at the Megaliths Mr Habitat’s Home Policy The Oxford English Dictionary Crime Fiction Snowfall Mr Habitat While an Inheritor of Thomas Edison’s Light The Lemon Tree at 42° South from 52° North China Sydney Olympian The Only Children The Beijing Expressway Jasmine in a Temple Garden Exposure Photographs of Shandong Peasant Children Two Ways of Looking at Landscape Lands of the Ants The Landlord Attitudes in a Possible Food Museum Mr Habitat on Anger Heat and Light Loggerheads Cold Weather Voice Theory and Practice Mr Habitat and the Protection Racket Appointment Classic Hit Being Here Long Wait at Quick Shoe Repairs Saxophone in a Pawnbroker’s Window Mr Habitat in Public Places Excursion, Delayed Tasmania True Stories Other Dominions Insomnia The Banana’s Republic Abundance View excerpt as PDF: Click here to view a sample (68 KB) Excerpt from book: Mr Habitat While an Inheritor of Thomas Edison’s Light Fluorescent light, midnight, lovely mother made me the star, as yet unnamed, of the maternity ward if I could remember, addicted there and then to tame the dark. Then on my feet with a switch in reach, the night was an interval of whatever length I pleased. Floodlit, with a ball in play, I shined. In great artificial light I grew, snapped up a car, black and sleek, to cruise saved nineteenth century streets that, from the gloom — the gloomy churches — gas light released. In the museum, gloomy proof. A flashback of me I save, far off, speeding, lights high beam, like an opening night no celebrity can find — or in the office, high and bright, after eight I could be the rising star. I climbed. I climbed, floor after floor, — where this would lead I couldn’t see — each window claiming darkness, like a prize. Previous review quote: Andrew Sant writes intellectually compelling and formally taut poems … made possible when an exceptional facility with language collides with everyday subjects. Brian Henry PN Review Previous review quote: Sant’s accomplished, cosmopolitan style gains from repeated exposure. ‘Pleasure’ has been a word much trivialized of late when talking about poetry, but Sant’s poems genuinely provide that all-too-rare commodity … Tremors should make readers fully aware of Sant’s achievement. Nicholas Birns Verse Previous review quote: What Sant’s poetry, like all good poetry, gives us is the nimbus surrounding the facts, the aura of intimation, imagery and music which makes those facts begin to speak of things whereof we cannot speak … Whatever a Sant poem is ostensibly about, or begins by being about, a hell of a lot of other matters are likely to be encountered between beginning and end. Stephen Edgar Famous Reporter Previous review quote: Sant’s words are chosen with proper care, he has an eye for the telling metaphor, a just sense of rhythm and writes a lively, gritty free verse that is serious without being po-faced and not without real humour. Matt Simpson Stride Magazine Previous review quote: The poems are witty, acerbic, intelligent … muscular verse which dances through the pages. Nicolette Stasko Southerly Previous review quote: Sant’s poems are of a distinguished order … poetry that transcends its own nationality and locality, to become the reader’s own territory and the reader’s own time. Elizabeth Knottenbelt Agenda Previous review quote: What chiefly makes Sant a distinctive and distinguished poet is his craftsmanship … Poem after poem in this collection radiates with a quickened, nervous energy and an active sense of engagement. Paul Hetherington Australian Book Review Previous review quote: I don’t see how you could read this without being at once aware that you’re in the presence of a most accomplished poet … It’s good to know that while in literature’s market-place ‘the arrogant, the forward and the vain’, to use Dickens’s formulation, are making their usual uproar, altogether elsewhere Andrew Sant is busying himself with the making of true poems John Lucas Critical Survey